Patrick White's expressionism

It is ironic that it is White’s very marginality – both in terms of sexuality and in terms of national belonging – that makes him a candidate for renewed interest by mainstream modernist studies. Attending to the places where his queer aesthetic reveals cracks in the edifice on which gender hierarchies and the epistemological dichotomies flowing from them are built makes his writing seem even more radical than his mastery of technical innovation. Moreover, the ease with which his dismantling of the categories on which gendered identities are built can be connected to other constituent elements of identity such as national identity, geographical location and ethnicity – of increasing interest to scholars of modernist studies – is further evidence that attention to White in global modernist studies is long overdue. In his fascination with, in Doan and Garrity’s phrase, ‘the transgressive, marginal, and liminal’, White’s work points to the importance of attending to the intersection of modernist studies and queer studies. This extends beyond simply a thematic focus on gender and sexuality: to destabilise them as categories is to uncover the ways in which they are discursively constructed. By deconstructing the hierarchical oppositions that structure their relations, White’s work challenges our understanding of modernity itself by inviting us to rethink where we draw the line between normative and non-normative, natural and unnatural and dominant and deviant.